Here now is another equally disparaging account of the merger, but from the perspective of a pre-IPO Google (GOOG) employee:

After the acquisition, Google made a very big deal of giving the DoubleClick people all the major positions of power in the engineering & product teams. The idea was to make a strong show of good faith that the DCLK team was going to be treated VERY well post-acquisition.

Unfortunately there were a lot of senior people at Google already working on display advertising, and they suddenly found there was no path to promotion because all the DCLK'ers had been inserted over them. So they fled like rats, leaving the entire team run by DCLK execs.

Some good names to look into include [redacted] (engineering), [redacted] (engineering), [redacted](product), [redacted] (product). All of them were working on Google's display products when the acquisition went through, and all of them were on other projects within six months. My understanding is that the same basic thing happened on the sales side of the house, as well.

It should have been fine for DCLK to run the display products, but they had no idea how to get shit done at Google. The founders can't stand the DCLK people, so without any help from experienced Googlers, they are flying blind, and they definitely can't get the resources or support they want. A lot of great DCLK people have given up and left because they know they can't get anything done there - take a look into Dave Fall, for example.

Anyway, it's a total shit show. Google tried way too hard to make DCLK feel good about the acquisition and it completely backfired.